Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I've told all the members of my research group they should watch this, so I thought I might as well make the same recommendation to the rest of the world... Herbert Van de Sompel presented "Towards a Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication System" at LIBER 2011 in Barcelona, Spain on June 30, 2011. You really have to simultaneously watch the video and review the slides to get the full impact of the presentation. The first part is a succinct review of various projects, but starting at slide 16 ("nanopublications") things really get interesting. Well worth the 40 minute investment. Towards a Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication System View more presentations from Herbert Van de Sompel --Michael

Online annotating service is a tool that helps to annotate different resources with different authors and give this annotation a separate URI that can be shared using a Facebook post, blog post, tweet, etc. Web annotations can be described as a relation between different resources with different media types like text, image, audio, or video. The web annotation service will be able to provide: A unique URI for every annotation. Persistent annotations. Annotate specific part of media. Keep track of the resources. Present annotation in browser. Meet the OAC model requirements ( alpha3 release ) . Open Annotation Model: This service will generate annotations that meet the OAC model specification. In an annotation that contains different resources, the OAC will introduce a new resource that describes the relationships between the resources that make the annotation. Example: A user who is interested in wildlife is browsing a page about elephants in Africa, and he was interested in the map...

October was a busy travel month. On October 11-13, I attended a technical meeting for the Open Annotation Collaboration project at Berkeley, CA. From there, I traveled to Berlin, Germany to give a keynote about OAI-ORE at the Wireless Communication and Information Conference (WCI 2009). Michael Herzog was kind enough to invite me to speak there again; I also gave an invited talk at Media Production 2007 , also in Berlin. After a short week back in the US, it was off to Lima, Peru to give another keynote about OAI-ORE, this time at Reunión Interamericana de Bibliotecarios, Documentalistas y Especialistas en Información Agrícola, or RIBDA 2009 . This was also another repeat performance -- I had given an invited talk about OAI-PMH in Lima in 2004 , and my colleague there, Libio Huaroto, invited me back. Slides from the keynotes are probably available on the conference web sites, however they were both edited versions of the more detailed ORE seminar I recently gave at Emory...

A significant part of my research time in 2007-2008 was spent working on the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse & Exchange project (OAI-ORE, or simply just ORE). Producing the OR E suite of eight documents was difficult and took longer than I anticipated, but we had an excellent team and I'm extremely proud of the results. In the process, I also learned a great deal about the building blocks of ORE: the Web Architecture , Linked Data and RDF . I'm often asked "What is ORE?" and I don't always have a good, short answer. The simplest way I like to describe ORE is "machine readable splash-pages". More formally, ORE addresses the problem of identifying Aggregations of Resources on the Web. For example, we often use the URI of an html page as the identifier of an entire collection of Resources. Consider this YouTube URI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkJDKdOlUGQ Technically, it identifies just the html page that is returned when that URI is d...